Texture baking tool

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Now you can project current mesh on another mesh and get textures of color, specular, normalmaps and displacement forr that mesh. It works fast, the baking takes almost the same time like simple texture saving. It uses multiple processors if you have it. Why do you need texture baking?

1) To get correct displacement maps even in case when you have dragged surface in sculpt tool.

2) Sometimes you need to change topology or uv-set of mesh. For example you need to simplify mesh and get textures for simplified mesh. In this case you can use texture baking.

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Ok, I will give one example, why baking tool is so important. Baking tool is especially important if you want to ger a texture for low-poly mesh as a result. Let us take for example sphere and draw the strip over it like it is shown below:

Then we should go to sculpt tool and distort it slightly using drag tool:

Then we should enter into low-poly mode. What will you see?

It is because you have distorted geometry, but texture is not distorted, so mesh looks improperly in low-poly mode. In thins case baking tool can help you. You should project new high-poly distorted mesh onto low-poly mesh. In this way you will get distorted textures. Please compare the result of usual export of normalmap texture with result of baking tool:

Simple export result:

Baking tool result:

The differene is obvious - you have got the correct normal map using baking tool. The options for taking that normalmap are below:

[x] Use current low-poly mesh...

[ ] Use original positions ...

[ ] Smooth mesh

The options should be other if you need displacement:

[x] Use current low poly mesh

[ ] Use original positions...

[x] Smooth mesh

[x] Preserve positions ...

But the result will be better if you don't need displacement and need only normalmap. It is because of getting displacement is not trivial operation and mesh should be smoothed before. It is required because the displacement is difference between mesh and smoothed surface.

I think that simple example shows you why baking tool is so important.